A Crypto Winter Would Be Welcomed by Top Developers, Says Vitalik Buterin (businessinsider.com) 99
Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has said many crypto developers wouldn't be unhappy to see a continued slide in the price of digital currencies, as the slump could clear out less-viable projects. From a report: Cryptocurrencies have fallen in recent weeks alongside stocks, as investors grow more cautious about taking risks given persistent rises in inflation, expected interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and geopolitical tensions. But the prospect of more losses and a bear market -- generally, where prices fall 20% from a recent high -- won't deter some in the crypto world, Buterin told Bloomberg. "The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market," he said in an interview published Saturday. [...] On the other hand, falling prices separate the curious from the serious, he argued. That is why a "crypto winter" -- when prices keep crashing and fail to recover for a long time -- could be seen as a positive. "The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away, and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their models and in their teams and their people," the ethereum cofounder said.
Sure, like the tulip winter helped... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just don't expect the time "after the winter" to be anything like before.
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How many years do you need to be proven wrong? It's been over a decade at this point.
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That's how I felt in 2015 after I missed the chance to mine crypto (when you could still do it with a CPU) because I read opinions of people that it was worthless.
Since then I've never let strongly emotional opinions influence me. That is, if I want to do it, I'll do it.
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I mined some Litecoins back when they were worth around $5. If I had just dumped what it cost for the GPUs directly into buying coins, I’d have about $30k today.
You’d either have to go further back in time or have a lot more spare change to “gamble” to have had a rags-to-riches story. An extra $30k would certainly be nice to have, but it’s not a life changing amount of money. Now if we were talking half a million - yeah, it’s time to move out of this trailer park.
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Nah, I was going to start mining Bitcoin in 2010. I thought it sounded cool (whether it would be practical or not), but I let negative people dissuade me.
If it were actual money I was investing, that would be worth putting more research into. But something that was just fun? I should have done it.
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I don’t remember hearing about Bitcoin until it was already to the point where you needed a relatively beefy GPU to have any realistic chance of mining some coins. In hindsight, I should’ve just offered to buy some off of someone who had mined them, back when nobody thought they were worth anything.
I kinda lost interest in PC gaming sometime after my Radeon 8500 was considered obsolete, so my thought process at the time was that I’m not buying an expensive GPU just to goof around with som
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I accept crypto-coins or elements of it are here to stay. People still raise tulips commercially as well but outside of a small number of specialized nurseries nobody has their entire business/net-worth tied up in them. Even the best varieties can be had for a few bucks a bulb.
Crypto-coins and block chain ledgers will survive to but probably in a form that is more honest about what they are today. Tokens that merely represent some number of wait for it .... dollars. Just like you go get a cashiers check,
Re:Sure, like the tulip winter helped... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been over a decade and it's still unpredictably volatile, with not much rhyme or reason for it going up or down. You can't plan a long term contract on it, you can't plan out a loan term, you can't plan pricing around it. There's nothing to get out of it right now but speculation in hopes of there being a next person to sell to for more money, in essence playing the pyramid scheme hot potato and hoping you aren't the one holding it when there's no one left interested in paying X% more..
Could there be one day a real economic strategy leveraging some of this technology? Possibly, but no way of knowing if and what if any current implementations would be a part of the real strategy.
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USDC, USDT, UST, and MIM are all stable coins. Some are even managed algorithmically via smart contracts (UST and MIM), neat!
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And, like tether, there will be eventually be a panicked search for the dollars that are supposed to be backing the coins just before each one of those collapses.
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Not all cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin. If you want a stable priced cryptocurrency, you can have one - that problem has been solved.
USDC, USDT, UST, and MIM are all stable coins. Some are even managed algorithmically via smart contracts (UST and MIM), neat!
What's the point?
Why not just digitally transfer existing currency?
You're trusting that these alt currencies have the assets to back them that they claim to. What is your recourse when they don't?
Just about every regular currency has regulations protecting it, some kind of deposit insurance. What abut this funny money you're suggesting?
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You can't go "off the grid", yet expect nanny states to protect you. The point of taking that risk is avoiding governments eyes, or paypals freezing your money, yet having digital transfers and the the security of not having cash stack at home.
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So it's not meant to be a currency? Just some nutter in the wilderness tokens people want to collect? So they can swap them with other nutters I presume.
What about after they've finished playing dress ups, and need things from the real economy?
Re: Sure, like the tulip winter helped... (Score:2)
Well, then you sell them to fools that still think they're worth something, now that you've wised up.
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The point of taking that risk is avoiding governments eyes
Except that for most of the crypto-currencies, 'transparency' is the word of the day and all transactions are visible to all, so not only could the government track all the transactions, so too could Google, Facebook, etc.
paypals freezing your money
True, but often you have only the word of some company that they have the USD to back up your balance. Some folks think fractional reserve banking is risky, data suggests that Tether is way more overleveraged than the worst banks, but it's hard to say because it's not regulated.
So perhaps
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How has that problem been solved?
I understand the principle - have an organization that prints out cryptographically-secure digital pieces of paper that are backed by a promise to peg them to a currency or a basket of currencies, and exchange them for that upon demand.
But the problem is adoption. Why not just hold the currency or basket of currencies instead of the digital stablecoin? The risk-to-reward rat
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It's been over a decade and it's still unpredictably volatile
It's based on the "Greater Fool" theory and we all know that fools are infinite.
The real question is: Is the fool's money infinite? We all know that answer to that (ie. "no").
So ...a crypto winter? That gives time for the existing fools to recover and new fools to arise. Of course they want it!
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and we all know that fools are infinite.
Fools are limited by the world population. This may seem unnecessary pedantic until you visualize pyramid schemes exponential growth [quoracdn.net]
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Fools are limited by the world population.
There's a steady supply of new ones.
The supply has been exponential so far, although it has been slowing down in the last few years. Even if it eventually plateaus there'll still be a steady supply.
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You can't plan a long term contract on it, you can't plan out a loan term, you can't plan pricing around it.
Worth mentioning that Brazil handled this problem (when they had hyper-inflation) by writing inflation into the contracts. That is, if the value of the currency went down, you paid more. If the value of the currency went up, you paid less.
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I assume they required a reference point, probably USD. That the contracts were defined in terms of USD, but logistical need to execute in local currency. If not for a hard requirement to use local currency, I would suspect the parties to a contract would not *want* this.
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I assume they required a reference point, probably USD. That the contracts were defined in terms of USD, but logistical need to execute in local currency. If not for a hard requirement to use local currency, I would suspect the parties to a contract would not *want* this.
WTF? No, you don't need an external currency as a reference point to measure inflation, in fact it'd be stupid to, and noone does that. Inflation is measured by a "standard basket of goods" - how much money you need to buy a preset amount of various goods. That's how for example pegged currencies like USD and yuan can have different inflation rates in spite of fixed exchange rates. Chinese farmers want to earn more and demand higher prices for their grain? Boom, inflation on yuan. You're not going to import
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I'm saying that there's no way a contract to compensate for hyper-inflation/deflation risk said 'you'll pay... well whatever I guess'.
He said in brazil that if the value goes *down* meaning it must have some reference point. I said *probably* USD, but it could have been euro, yen, or some index. USD is a popular choice for a stable reference point.
The fixation on the guess of USD as the reference point misses the bigger thing: that the example doesn't bolster crypto, it just says if you are *stuck* having
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Unlike other securities, cryptocurrencies are pretty much left up to market manipulators in what their value is. Some big name says they are buying BTC? It shoots up. Another name says they are dumping crypto, there goes that coin's value. An exchange gets "hacked"? etc. If this market manipulation was done with other financial instruments, there would be jail time.
Cryptocurrency also doesn't make any money. If I buy real estate, I can put a house on it and rent it out. If I buy blue chip stocks, I
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It's been over a decade and it's still unpredictably volatile
I dunno, it seems like it's pretty easy to predict that it will be volatile.
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It's been over a decade at this point, and crypto is still not in use as currency.
How many years do you need to be shown that it's not a currency?
Re: Sure, like the tulip winter helped... (Score:2)
A Rose by any other name....
Yeah btc failed as a 'currency' and people came up with other products /coins with various other uses.
They'll change the name at some point to tokens or such. Or not.
The main thing is it allows you to easily incentivize people for running a common infrastructure for an immutable ledger without agreeing on some trusted auditor or authority. Like BitTorrent incentivized you to upload while you download, nothing more, conceptually at least.
And it automates the entire thing with smar
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...Wanting to kill a new technology with certain unique offerings for no reason than such imaginary ones like high power use or use by criminal isn't logical.
Nobody wants to "kill" blockchain technology. I am just pointing out that "cryptocurrency" isn't actually currency, and there is no sign that it is ever going to be.
Some scams take decades to be revealed (Score:3)
As tlhIngan pointed out: [slashdot.org]
Re: Some scams take decades to be revealed (Score:3)
So you are saying that crypto is as good or bad as any other financial / banking sector product or service ?
Re: Some scams take decades to be revealed (Score:2)
I'm not the person you are replying to, but DeFi is essentially an attempt to rebuild the current financial system only without any protections. Yes, all the problems in the existing system are still present in the blockchain world, along with a bunch more that have theoretically been regulated out of existence.
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If "any other financial / banking sector product or service" is the same to you as a poorly compiled list of financial failures ranging from financial bubbles to fraud... Wanna buy some NFTs?
I may have to go and make some more soon, had a lot of fiber yesterday.
As for the list... 2007-2008 financial crisis did not "started in the 70s" - if just looking at the timeline [wikipedia.org] it is easy to notice that the 2007-2008 was only the biggest mortgage-related bubble to burst - and that several bubbles were being inflated,
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Yeah, but in that decade virtually all goals have been given up. Crypto currencies are no longer de-centralized, they have now fully turned into purely speculative objects. 10 years ago crypto currencies were even more useful than they are now, as back then small transactions were still feasible.
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Tiptoe through the tulips. (Score:2)
Say, there's talk that whatever on earth is going on in Canada may boost crypto.
consolidate (Score:4, Funny)
We'd love a chance to consolidate as many coins/tokens as possible before prices go up again. Please leave crypto and sell us your holdings at a discount. Thank you.
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You had me going, right up 'til that part. Near as I can tell, the value of cryptocurrency evaluates to all zeros - not a one in sight. Certainly, not a two, or any of those other numbers that don't exist...
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You are wrong, cryptocurrency fails all the tests of money. Illiquid, not a stable store of value, not universally accepted (not accepted anywhere, just exchanged for dollars, real money, right away)
The gambling token bitcoin has huge disadvantages compared to currency, no one should use it as such. As investment vehicle it's too volatile and so should be avoided as toxic.
Re:Money 2.0 (Score:4, Informative)
uh huh, like Tether claimed 1:1 dollar backing. Then in April 2019 Tether's lawyers claimed 74 cents backed each dollar.. then in 2021 it was found only 2.9 percent backed by cash and 65 percent by "commercial paper". OAG fined them nearly 20 million dollars for their lies.
So I'd take the claims of "stability" of those "stablecoin" with a cubic meter bag of salt.
Gambling token for those that want to place risky game, that's all these cryptocurrencies are. They sure aren't money.
Re: Money 2.0 (Score:4, Informative)
Thatâ(TM)s not the definition of any money.
Read Rothbardâ(TM)s: âoeWhat has government done to our money?â chapters 1-3 for a better idea of what defines money.
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To all the naysayers, cryptocurrency is the evolution of currency.
Except it's not used as a currency. It is used as a speculative investment, and it is used as a method to launder money.
It literally does everything better than fiat,
Actual currency is faster, so not "everything".
Actual currency doesn't have fees, so definitely not "everything".
Actual currency can be exchanged without an internet connection, so definitely positively not "everything".
...From Wikipedia:
To fulfill its function, money must have certain properties:
1. Wikipedia is not canonical.
2. Listing "currency must have these properties" does not reply the reverse, "Therefore everything with these properties is currency".
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Someone has confused "being critical" with "being smart"
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Right - is that why my ACH transfers take 2 *business* days to clear? Or are you referring to cash, which travels at the pace of snail mail? Speed across any distance is precisely one of the reasons I'd like to use Bitcoin more often.
I don't disagree that Bitcoin has flaws, and you point out a few valid ones. However, it is currently actively used as a medium of exchange and of transfer of value, in addition to the money laundering and speculation. I don't part
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You sound like someone who invested their life savings in crypto, just before the collapse began, and are not reduced to living in a cardboard box and eating out of a dumpster.
Found Pyrite Pete (Score:2, Insightful)
Crypto winter? (Score:3)
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Another way to look at it, is with energy consumption as a marker for 'value' (aka scarcity)
How much energy is consumed to bring some arbitrary amount of gold or silver to market? (sure it can be used in manufacturing and the like; but a sizeable chunk is used as a store of value because it's rare and expensive to extract -- always has been.)
Crypto at large is basically just cutting the middle-man: the consumption of that energy is the value -- directly.
it's interesting how the FUD regarding energy usage w
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it's interesting how the FUD regarding energy usage with crypto kind of hit the fore last year when BTC broke the 60k USD threshold. didn't hear much about it until then; same with the bleating about it needing more regulation
If you need to heat your home then resistive heating like mining/processing crypto is almost exactly 100% efficient, it only comes down to hardware costs, hash efficiency, and the difference in electrical and gas prices and how much heating is needed as to viability. We have some wind, nuclear, and solar power so it’s moving toward green and getting greener by the year. I’d need a variance for a heat pump and it would cost about the same as a mining rig large enough anyway.
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A few friends and I had the idea of coupling the money supply to energy use decades before crypo-coins were a thing. You set up some kind of constitutional amendment requiring the central bank to expand or contract the M3 according to the number of kilowatt hours consumed in the economy along with some clear rules about efficiency adjustments and some codified inflation again expressed as dollars / megawatt hours or similar.
It has to be an amendment so its hard for the pols to tamper with the rules. The th
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Mine crypto and use the waste heat to warm your home. Win/win!
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If the price of natural gas gets much higher I’m going to need crypto to moon just to heat my home. It’s harder to lose when the main purpose is to waste energy as heat.
What, you mean solar and hydro haven't replaced that for you!?
;)
bitcoin max transactions is to low, ETH fees high (Score:1)
bitcoin max transactions is to low, ETH fees are to high.
For any real day to day use.
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Those are technical issues, not properties of cryptocurrency.
So, what you apparently meant to say is "Cryptocurrency would "literally do everything better than fiat" if the technical issues were solved.
...also, by the way, could somebody moderate your post a dupe?
Re:Money 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
What, did you time travel from the previous decade?
Bitcoin did indeed look like it was going to get used as a currency. Steam was taking payments in it. Then the blocks filled up, fees of $50/transaction came, and everyone dropped it. Now it's purely speculator territory, and nobody is even trying to get coffee shops to adopt it anymore. All anybody talks about is its price in USD. It's useful for speculation and nothing else. And if speculators ever move on, whoever has any will be left holding a worthless asset.
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but what about offline use like vending? arcade ga (Score:2)
but what about offline use like vending? arcade games (in bars where they just have coins / bills)?
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Hahaha, you think a GAMING platform "taking payments" (no, just converting to dollars right away) meant anything.
Bitcoin always was just a gambling token, fails all the tests of money.
Without fiat to give it value.... (Score:3, Insightful)
All anybody talks about is its price in USD.
Did you ever notice how the bitcoin bros are always boasting about the price of it while trashing fiat currencies? And how they always use a fiat value to compare its price with?
Without fiat to give it value, their precious bitcoin is worthless.
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You might then point to currency, but currency has a value as a currency. Crypto is too unstable and has other bad characteristics to be used as a currency.
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What also happened is that if you want to pay for things in some fancy futuristic way, you can do so from your smartphone. The best part is, the money comes through as good old fashioned dollars that you don’t have to sell on an exchange.
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You don't know what you're talking about.
The bitcoin community is constantly trying to get stores and businesses to use bitcoin. Among other things the lightning network has fixed the fee issue (transactions are now $0.05 on a good day, and effectively zero on lightning), so using it to transact is feasible if you can manage the price volatility. That volatility is also less of an issue if you don't use Bitcoin as a store of value, only as a transaction medium: i.e., convert on receipt, which I believe Stri
speculators need to lose there ass as well crime (Score:2)
speculators need to lose there ass as well as the crime parts of crypto.
Something I've noticed about crypto people (Score:4, Insightful)
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It’s all a matter of perspective. Oil going up is a good thing if you’re heavily invested in petroleum, it’s not so good if you’re filling up a giant SUV. If you’re looking to buy a house, a housing market crash is a great thing.
What we’re seeing here is not the side of the story from people who bought in to BTC at $60k. They’re probably less than pleased at the moment.
Curious (Score:1)
New tech is always unpredictable (Score:1)
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Anyone else remember ...
When TV news would make fun of the Internet for being an unreliable source of information?
Dude, that was last year.
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Inflation... (Score:3)
Wasn't one of the main Bitcoin Bro claims that, "it was supposed to be a hedge against inflation" ?
The $US would be inflated away and only stable finite Bitcoin would save us.
Yet here the article and one of the biggest pumpers, claiming rising inflation and falling crypto is all normal and expected. And he'd like to see more of it.
Cryptocurrencies have fallen in recent weeks alongside stocks, as investors grow more cautious about taking risks given persistent rises in inflation, expected interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and geopolitical tensions
Do the rest of the Bitcoin Bros know he's going this far off script?
Don't persistent rises in inflation make crypto more valuable anymore?
What changed?
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Half of these guys are spectacular idiots, and the other half are running a scam. It's fundamentally idiotic to think that a semi-anarchic currency is going to have the stability of a fiat currency backed by the world's largest military.
Had my crypto winter with my Coinye's (Score:2)
Still holding on to 378 Coinye's in the hope that they will hit $1M someday.
Coinye's are as underappreciated as Ye's works of art.
What are developers doing? (Score:2)
all good (Score:2)
Like really? coingecko.com: Coins: 12751 At the very least 2000 of them are traded. However outside of BTC and ETH and maybe a dozen or two of old cryptos, everything else is a giant pump and dump scheme and it's not about the slump of bad projects, it's about the fact that people may grow tired of wasting that much money on an organized gambling market.
if i didnt like the guy before (Score:1)